tore.torden.org

Today was the last day of my stay up here for the field-season. Tomorrow - or today since it’s just past midnight as I write this - I will take the plane back to Oslo. I am really looking forward to going back to Christiane and my friends and my life there. While leaving is something I look forward to with much anticipation, a small part of me is a bit sad as well ..

Before I came back up to Svalbard, I imagined a field-season where I would spend a lot of time on my own, being bored etc. It didn’t turn out like that at all thanks to the great new friends I’ve made up here. I know a lot of people up here now, but the hard core of my new friendships is mostly with the other students and field-assistants who were here during summer. People such as :

Mona “Moan-Aaahh!!” Fuhrmann - a saucy german girl who lives on a vegetarian diet comprised entirely of aphrodisiacs. Her ever more popular love-hearts and banana cake gets the blood flowing in all kinds of funny body parts. She can also take a joke and can catch you completely off guard with kick-ass comeback and riposte jokes that you would not expect from such a seemingly “innocent” girl.

Philip “Tundraman” Semenchuk - A great, easygoing guy with a taste for pastry. He likes taking naps on the tundra and “fucking things up”. He contributed a great deal to the corruption of the way people interact up here by inventing new ways to use the word “fuck”. He also lives in the 80s, likes jazz and is a great improviser in the kitchen.

Jochem “Motherfucker” Veenboer - a dutch bartender with a taste for older women .. and younger women too, of course. He’s a smooth motherfucker and also a great guy to hang with if you happen to be stuck in a cabin for a while because of bad weather. He is sometimes surrounded by girls when alcohol is involved. Good luck with kicking the smoking habit!

Kim “Lil’ Kim” Klein - The dutch Kim is a complex person. An exhibitionistic insomniac, she’s a good singer and loves karaoke. Whereas most people have collections of music that they like, Kim has a collection of karaoke versions of songs. Several gigabytes! That’s crazy. She also likes documenting embarassing things that happen when you’re drunk by filming it with her camera. Also, her periods sometimes make her puke, but she doesn’t let that stop her from having fun.

Anika “riot grrrl” Beiersdorf - At first glance, she seems like a pretty blonde, but you soon find out that Anika will take you down and fuck you up. She is bad-ass, but in a good way. Aside from wanting to shoot tourists who step into her fieldsite, she likes friendly fights with love-interest Chris and aggressive electronica, preferably along with dancing and zamboca shots. Handle with care.

Marie Helene “Hippie girl” Jacques - The instantly likeable, memorable and weird french-canadian is full of everyday wisdom and thinks that science and art should go together. She looks a bit like a native american and she has no reservations about telling people exciting information about her private life. Just ask nicely and she will be happy to show you her diva-cup. She’s also a hardcore outdoors-person and was a rafting guide before she came here. Very much missed!

Markus “Max Hardcore” Eckerstorfer - This highly opinionated austrian is the only guy on Svalbard who can (and sometimes do) wear a tight bikecycle shorts and still kick ass. He’s also able to mix being an able athlete and being a notorious party-machine. Play “love shack” or “club tropicana” if you wanna see him dance and sing. Every nachspiel should have a Max in it!

Chris “christ, it’s Chris” Ware - Possibly “hardware” would also be a better nickname since he’s such a solid guy. Although he’s a native english speaker, he’s the hardest person to understand at Unis. He brings great enthusiasm to everything he does. His constant good mood and able social skills are probably very handy for a guy that spends so much time wiping shoes in the airport. For many visitors, the first thing they met when they came to Svalbard was an eager tasmanian with a shoe-brush. He’s also the man with the goods as he runs the weekly “friday gathering”, something we all owe him our thanks for. Just don’t let him loose on the bike track!

Graeme “Graeme” Abel - In Scotland, the name Graeme is pronounced “Graham”. When people found out how his name was spelled, that was no longer his name. Graaeeme!! With a constant desire to impress, he’s a real talker and can go on and on about any kind of subject for possibly an unlimited amount of time. That’s alright because talking with Graeme is really enjoyable, despite the sometimes hard scottish accent with the strange words and phrases. His constantly positive nature gives a lift to any situation.

These people are of course just a few of my friends up here and there are more I could mention like Allison “Weird Al” Bailey, James “superbrit” Speed or my supervisor Malu (I won’t make up a funny nickname for her, though. I mean, she’s my supervisor!). These are all awesome people and have made my stay on Svalbard so much more enjoyable. Some of you I will see again, but some of you I might not. I will miss you all! Give me or Christiane a call if you are ever in Oslo. :-)

So that’ it ..

As Phil might put it, I leave Svalbard with one laughing eye and one crying eye. The crying eye is thinking “Goodbye Svalbard! Goodbye friends!” while my laughing eye (which is a bit bigger) is thinking “Hello girlfriend, awesome cooking, band rehearsals, outdoor bubble baths, great movies at cinemas, proper diurnal rythmns and awesome rock ‘n roll parties with my friends in Oslo!”

Yesterday, I packed up site 4, the one behind the airport. It was a strange feeling, packing it up. Not bad, just strange. My time here (for now) is coming to an end. I carefully made a drawing of all the traps and their relative position and distance from eachother so that I can re-establish my site later if I need to. Today I’m taking down site 3, the one in the middle of Adventdalen by the old northern lights observatory. I’ll take down the other sites as well later in the week.

It’s been quite cold these last few days compared to only a week ago. My traps yesterday had ice in them! It’s also getting darker with each day, although it’s not completely dark yet. Check out some of these pictures I took at the UNIS roof yesterday at about half past ten in the evening. They look darker than it actually was - we’re in the twilight period, but still - you can see the sun is behind the mountains and we’re getting some nice colors these days (and soon, proper nights).

Last week, Chris took me, Andrew and Phillip as field assistants on a trip to Pyramiden to look for invasive weeds. I’ve been to nordaustlandet, been to Kongsfjorden and Ny-Ålesund, been on a scootertrip to the east-coast, been to Svea, been to two coal-mines and also dog-sledding .. Barentsburg and Pyramiden felt like the two things I had yet to do, so I was grateful for the opportunity!

“So what’s Pyramiden?” you might ask yourself. No worries, I’ll explain. Pyramiden is an abandoned russian settlement about 50 kilometres from Longyearbyen. At most, the town housed over 1000 people and the coal operation ran continously for more than 50 years. In 1998, it was abandoned, but it’s still being looked after by a handful of people living there. Tourist ships also visit regularly and the easiest way to get there is by boat or crossing the sea-ice by scooter if possible.

It was a calm, sunny day and Monica brought us to Pyramiden with the polarcirkel. The first thing we met when we went ashore was a cat hungry for some human contact (or more likely, food). I’m not a big fan of cats, especially not up here on Svalbard where they really shouldn’t be, but this one was charming (a master manipulator) and Phil seemed to take an instant liking to it. After playing around with the pussycat, it didn’t take long until we found some interesting grasses, but focusing on fieldwork is hard when you’re in Pyramiden. The town itself seems so much more interesting. Chris’ idea was to find a map he’d seen in a picture. He knew it was on a wall somewhere in town, so we headed for the town center to start our search.

The russians seem to have a bit more “style” than us norwegians. For example, they know how to decorate a town. Just check out the cool monument in the town center! Instead of putting up simple signs that tell you where you are, they put up real big, chunky pieces of installation art that gives the whole place a real feel of russian pride and history. They also know how to put up benches and areas where people can gather and hang around. Maybe they have more of a “community spirit” than we do.

Anyways, most of the buildings are off-limits according to the notes hanging on most of the doors in Pyramiden. I guess it’s part for people’s own safety and also to protect the place as I guess there may be plans to reopen the operation in the future. Anyways, we did visit some of the more welcoming buildings that didn’t have “no entrance” signs on them. In some of them, the interior was pretty banged up while in other buildings, everything was still in reasonably good shape, kinda like you see in Grumant and Colesdalen. Maybe angry workers trashed some of the buildings before they left? It’s a mystery. Anyways, maybe we entered some of the off-limits buildings as well, but maybe we didn’t. I’m not telling!

Botany in Pyramiden is a lot more interesting than around Longyearbyen. Many of the plants we’re used to as small and sometimes unimpressive are massive in Pyramiden compared to most of their relatives elsewhere. Most impressive were some really big, yellow dandelions. Bistortas and oxyrias also made good impressions and proved a nice nutritional addition to the vast amounts of cakes and sweets the boys brought for lunch. We had our food on a staircase at the end of a boardwalk ending up in front of a mysterious building. Chilling with cake and pacifier-sweets was awesome. Good times!

Just before it was time to leave, Chris had managed to find the map we’d been looking for. It was hanging on one of the buildings next to this other building that reminded me more of a sort of bird-cliff. Gulls had been making their homes in every window and the roof was full of them. Very cool - I even managed to get some pictures without being pooped on. Looking at the map, we thought we knew where to go to find the greenhouse, but being stressed and overconfident at the same time, we ended up behind a pig-farm instead. Oh well, there were still some interesting samples to get from various funky-looking weeds and I think Chris was reasonably satisfied. Also, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind going back if he had to.

On the way back, we met up with Monica who’d been for a hike in the mountain. Before we went back to Longyearbyen, she took us to the calving front of the Nordenskiold-glacier. We got some nice pictures and saw a bunch of seals hanging out on the sea ice. Lovely! Thanks Chris and Monica for an awesome trip!

Friday 15th of august, just after I came back to Longyearbyen after my fieldwork-week at Alkepynten, I met up with my father and younger brother who had come to visit me for the weekend. Superb! They didn’t stay for long, but we still got to do quite a lot of stuff.

After the happy reunion, we went for a car-trip. My father had rented a car and I acted as the tourist guide. We went everywhere you can go with a car without getting into problems with the sysselmann - and possibly some places where you could as well. We saw the new northernlights observatory, we saw Eindalen and in the other far end of the road, Bjørndalen and Svalsat and - of course - everything on the way there. Still, having been living in a wet tent for a few days, I was eager to get a warm shower and a proper night’s sleep without rocks in my back.

However, my father is an early riser. At 8:30, he was up and at 9:00, it was time for breakfast. Those 10 hours+ of sleep would have to wait! They had already bought lots of food, so after a lovely breakfast, we decided to go to the Longyear glacier to look for fossils and, of course, for the trip. With my local knowledge, we soon found a nice piece of moraine with fossils a bit further up on the glacier away from the fossil-scavenging hordes of tourists. Feeling satisfied with rocks in our pockets, we felt it might be a nice idea to get up on Sarkofagen, the mountain between the Longyear and Lars-glaciers. My father was particularly ambitious and found the shortest route up the mountain, climbing straight up the mountainside instead of following the tracks like less hardened tourists might do. After a lot of sweating and being slightly worried that some of us might get seriously hurt from rolling down the mountainside, our efforts were rewarded by us getting up on the part of Sarkofagen which is also part of the moraine from the Lars-glacier. It’s a lovely plateau with lots of Svalbard poppies. After a trip to the summit, we wrote our names in the Svalbard-turn book and continued down the Lars-glacier back to Nybyen. Excellent trip!

Later that day, my father bought us all dinner down at Huset. I had a 4 course dinner which, among other things, consisted of squid, reindeer, duck and, for dessert, icecream and cloudberry. To drink, we had both beer and a lovely red wine and my father also treated himself to a couple of glasses of whisky. His choice was a very nice and interesting Lagavulin, a good mood-setter for the rest of the evening.

At the end of our meal, the waiter suggested we continued our enjoyment in the pub - which was exactly what we had in mind - only we didn’t want to stay at Huset. Instead, we went down to Karls-berger, a pub with an excellent selection of many things - for example whisky. My younger brother had a bruichladdie, I wanted to try a Ben Nevis and my father had an old Scots. Scots buy whiskys from other distilleries, then let them mature even longer before they resell them back on the market. Thus, scots is not so much a brand in itself, but I can’t remember what distillery this bottle of Scots came from. Anyways, it was a speyside - like mine - and since none of us are true fans of Speyside whisky, we eventually left Karls-Berger and went to Svalbar instead where we knew they had a bottle of 14 year old Scapa. Filled up with squid, reindeer, duck, ice-cream, cloud-berries, wine, beer and a fine island-whisky, I felt satisfied with the day. It was time to go back to the barrack and get a proper night’s sleep ..

And then I was woken up just after 8 in the morning. It was already sunday and time for our trip to mine 3. We drove the rental up to the mine and arrived just in time for the guide’s talkthrough on the history of mining on Svalbard. It was an interesting lecture although it lacked enthusiasm, but were all eager and happy to get into our mining gear. Finally time to see the mine! Since I’d already been in mine 7 the previous year, I thought I had already seen coal-mining. I was wrong! Except for being cold, dark holes, mine 3 and mine 7 are quite different. In mine 7, the coal is dug out with a digger - a powerful vehicle you drive into the coal-seam. In mine 3, which was closed in 1996, the methods for extracting coal were a lot more old-fashioned and a lot more dangerous than work in mine 7. It included drilling out coal manually, crawling through dark holes and various dangerous tasks such as removing support pillars. The romantic idea of the miner as a tough man doing hard work in a dangerous and dark environment seems to relate more to the way things were run in mine 3 than in mine 7. Luckily, those days are largely over.

After the trip to the mine, we went on our own trip up to mine 2 on the slope between Longyear- and Nybyen. It was also a nice trip, but with so much getting around and doing stuff, I started feeling the need to relax a bit after a long week. My wish was granted and much of the rest of the evening was spent inside watching the latest Hellboy movie .. Well, except for a dinner in the pub at Huset where I had Flesk & Duppe - a traditional course I’ve never had before. It was excellent and if anyone reading this wants to eat at the pub there, then I heartily recommend it and also the hamburger.

This post doesn’t describe everything we did that weekend, but it sums up the highlights. All in all it was an excellent weekend and, spending a lot of time away from my family, I really appreciated it. Thanks pappa and Tormod for a lovely weekend! :-)

Here are some pictures :

My field season is definetly coming to an end. My traps no longer seem to catch many invertebrates and yesterday, I ordered a plane ticket back to Oslo. I’ll be leaving on friday the 12th of september and I’m really looking forward to seeing Christiane again as well as my other friends in Oslo. I’ll also treat myself to a short vacation to the south to see my friends down there. Hopefully, they still remember who I am.

Before I leave, I have heeeaaaps of work to do in the lab. I am strugglig a bit to keep my motivation up at the moment because I’m guessing I’ll have to work through the weekends if I want to be done with most of it before I travel back to Oslo. I can also bring back labwork with me I guess, but I would much prefer to be done with it before I leave. Oh well, less than three weeks to go!

To keep me motivated, I will think of all the nice things I can do when I get back. Here’s a short list of some of the things (also thanks to Christiane for some of these suggestions) :

• Attend my own “welcome back to Oslo” party - with lots of good friends, beer and whisky
• Go to a restaurant with Christiane and have some nice food
• Overnight camping trip with Christiane - includes some freshwater fishing
• A trip to Askimbadet, a nice place where you can enjoy a hot bubble bath outdoors
• Skating! I wanna get back into it. I heard they’ve tidied up a skating spot not far from our apartment.
• Going to a concert with The Residents
• Record songs, just rehearse or play concerts with our band Gladlaksene or other band-projects
• Attend my own “welcome back to Mandal” party - with lots of good friends, beer and whisky
• Play “Rock Band” with my friends down south. Appearantly, they need an able drummer.

Seeing Sam again, having good dinners and evenings with Christiane, getting back into some Age of Conan-ing, hopefully getting an office at the zoological museum at Tøyen and other minor things also make me long for the mainland. I guess what I really should do is to make a list of things I want to do on Svalbard before I leave to motivate me to stay here a bit longer!

Download tbatches.zip (~8kb)

Yo fellow batch-nostalgics. I’m releasing my slightly embarassing batch programs in a .zip pack for you to enjoy. If I make more batch programs, I can add them to this archive and reupdate this post.

As you may know, I’ve been trying to get into php and when doing so, I started programming random-number generators as an excercise. To make something slightly more interesting than just generating random numbers, I turned them into die-rollers and random draws from decks of cards. Who has a use for die-rollers and card-drawers? Why, roleplayers of course!

Instead of php, I’ve written these in batch because they’re easier to use for those who know “cmd”. Some of these batches will be very handy for tabletop roleplayers who forget their box of dice or for people who just want to get back into batch programming and need some examples to look at.

Here’s an introduction of my batch-files :

TDOMT.BAT - Tore’s Deck of Many Things

This is my most embarassing program so far and it simulates draws from a Deck of Many Things. You specify before you start how many draws you intend to make.

TDROLLER.BAT - Tore’s Die-Roller

This program simulates die-rolls. It can roll an X amount of dice with Y amount of sides. You define X and Y yourself. You can also add a bonus to the rolls and see the individual results for each roll.

TSROLLER.BAT - Tore’s Stat-roller

Forget about the deck of many things, this is far worse! This program rolls character stats for a Dungeons & Dragons character, compatible with AD&D, D&D (3rd ed) and D&D 3.5. Possibly 4th edition as well, but I don’t know!

It rolls 4d6 dice, then subtracts the die with the lowest value for all scores.

TRANDOM.BAT - Tore’s Random Number Generator

This simply gives you a random value between 1 and X where X is defined by you (%1).

Basically, if you don’t know how to use one of my files, just try and call it in prompt and add “?” or “/?” as the %1 value. Then you should get instructions on how to use that file.

To download, just click here or follow the link at the top of the post. Enjoy my batches!

Heya!

Since I came to Svalbard, I’ve been working hard to rid myself of whisky-newbdom and to get more tasting experience with the many fantastic scottish whiskys. Longyearbyen - and Karls-Berger Pub in particular - is a great place to try out various whiskys. Alcohol is cheaper up here than on the mainland because of less taxation and Karls-Berger pub is also among the top-ranking pubs when it comes to having a wide selection of whiskys behind the counter. Anyways, I’ve compiled here a short list of the single-malt whiskys I know I’ve tasted so far. I’ve had more speyside glens I’m sure, but their names are hard to remember.

Here’s my list so far :

Single malts I know I’ve had so far :

• Aberlour
• Ardbeg
• Arran
• Ben Nevis
• Bowmore
• Bruichladdich
• Caol Ila
• Glenfiddich
• Glenkinchie
• Glenlivet, The
• Highland Park
• Iona
• Isle of Jura
• Knockando
• Lagavulin
• Laphroaig
• Macallan, The
• Oban
• Scapa
• Talisker

I think it’s a pretty good list. Of these - Arran, Laphroaig and Scapa are the ones that made the biggest impression on me. I also quite like the other islays besides laphroaig as well as Talisker and Knockando. Except for the latter, I’m (so far) not such a fan of the speysides, so I know some classic glens are missing from my list. My favourite whisky up here at the moment is still Laphroaig quarter cask, a really peaty and oaky explosion of taste. It’s a young whisky and it’s like an islay fist in the mouth - only in a good way. With a few drops of water and a cold beer alongside to soften the impact, it’s very nice indeed.

But what about my whisky future? A friend, Anders Krabberød, brought a very special flask of Arran to me and Christianes moving-in party in Oslo. It was an amazing whisky, easily up there with my finest and most satisfying whisky-tasting experiences. Thus, I really want to get my hands on a bottle of Arran. Hopefully, I can get something similar to what we had that night. I also would like a bottle of Scapa, I quite like the 14 year old. The only problem is that it’s out of production, so it may not be the easiest one to get a hold of anymore, but bottles should still be on the market. My father also recommended both of these brands for me.

But these are brands I’ve already had - if only on one or two occasions - but what about the whiskys I’ve yet to taste? If you know a whisky that I should definetly try, please leave a suggestion with a comment to this post and I’ll add it to my whiskys-to-do list!

Tuesday 12th of August, I went with my supervisors to Alkepynten, an area on the north side of the mouth of Isfjorden, opposite Kapp Linnè. It was a rainy day. Logistics brought us out by boat and dropped us off at a beach there, not far from a cabin used by employees of the sysselmann. Before setting up our basecamp, we went over to the cabin to say hello to the officials and to explain our intentions on Alkepynten. There were two guys working there, one biologist and one police officer. They used the cabin as their base of operations and their job was to check up on activities and enforce the law in the surrounding areas. To get around, they had a rubber boat. They also had coffee and biscuits which they shared with us. Lovely! After some chit-chat, coffee and biscuits, we left the warmth of the cabin to establish our tent-camp in the rain. Afterwards, in my warm sleeping bag, lulled to sleep by the sound of the waves, the rain on the tent and the slight fear of being woken up by a mankilling polar bear, I had my best night’s sleep in Alkepynten. According to Malu, I was tossing and turning and taking up all the space so much that she kicked me in the face during the night (we were facing opposite directions), but I didn’t notice anything so that’s okay.

The next day, we woke up to more rain and there’s only a few likely things I can think of when you’re out camping that makes you long more for the warmth and dryness of home than having to put on wet, cold clothes to go out in the rain and have breakfast. Luckily for us, there was a slightly grotto-ish rock overhang by the beach where we found some shelter from the wind and the rain. We named it the “grove of tranquility”. The trip would’ve been much worse without it! The rest of the day was much better. As soon as we set off along the beach in the direction of Harrietbreen to do some fieldwork, the rain stopped and we had periods of sunshine. That mixed with the pleasantness of our surroundings quickly made me forget about the slightly damp and uncomfortable morning. A couple of highlights were the lunch we had in the field (dry-tek - just add hot water, beef with satay sauce) and seeing the glaciers. Finding polarbear tracks on the beach was a bittersweet experience. We didn’t want to get eaten, but seeing as the tracks were made by a very small bear, I figured maybe it would be possible to fight back - although Steve pointed out that small polar bears sometimes have bigger moms. Anyways, heading back to the camp, the cosmic laws of irony thought it would be appropriate with a nice shower of rain for dinner and bedtime to make sure we got nice and wet.

Thursday morning was the wettest. I had tried to dry my wet pants in my now rather damp sleepingbag along with my wet socks and instead of waking up dry, I found out that if you put a lot of wet clothes inside your sleepingbag, you may end up wetter than when you went to bed. Still, I was in a relatively good mood. I make it sound worse than it was. In fact, I quite like camping and after a wet breakfast in the grove, I was quite looking forward to getting out in the field again. Besides, just before we got out in the rain, Malu commanded the rain to stop - and it did! Appearantly, there may be more to small spanish girls than what is obvious. For the rest of the day, the skies cleared, the wind died down and we got quite a bit of sun. Malu needed to get some samples from the bird cliff, so we climbed up on the side of it away from the rock-piles where we thought we’d be safe from any nasty rolling surprises. About halfway up, Malu told us that she was in fact not so comfortable with heights, but that was fine with me because I was getting slightly worried myself. If you slip on a slope like that, you will continue to slip down the whole mountainside. At that time and place, it was not an attractive prospect. Instead of going all the way up, we found a shoulder relatively close to (we could smell the bird-poop) and got our samples there. Then we slowly went down again which, for some of us, was harder than going up. Having spent a lot of time jumping around on rocks as a kid, I felt quite comfortable - like a goat on the slopes. When we were almost all the way down, turning over a few rocks revealed an abundance of spiders, beetles and other invertebrates. Thus, the rest of our working day was spent on the slope, vacuuming invertebrates with our pooters. For lunch, we had self-heating food that came with everything you needed in one pack, even spoons. Excellent!

Back at the camp, Malu prepared yet another lovely dinner and I got to impress her and Steve with my rock-skipping skills that I had already perfected during my weekend in Svea. Rather than mentioning my ferocious training a couple of weeks beforehand, I let them believe it was a natural talent.

Friday morning, I woke up in a good mood. I had not been eaten during the night and it was our first dry morning since we came. After a good long breakfast and some more rock-throwing, Malu tested out our anti-bear tripwire alarm-system. The tripwire actually snapped before the shots went off. Great. Steve then tried to fire one of them and not to my surprise, it was a dud. For me, that means tripwires have failed in 100% of my camping experience with them. In the future, I will just keep doing what I do already - sleep in the middle.

I almost forgot, I also saw a fox that day. I’ve seen many, but this one was different because it’s the first fox I’ve seen this year with a white winter coat. He was also quite tame and let me get as close as 4-5 metres. I take it as an omen that winter is coming and that I can soon go back home to Christiane.

We were picked up with the polarcirkel by Magne and Mikkho from logistics. When we got back to Longyearbyen, my father and my younger brother was already in town .. but that’s another post. Instead, I present you these pictures from our trip :

Sometime during the week after Christiane left, I was approached by Graeme. He asked me if I wanted to go to Svea with him ..

Some of you mainland people may not know what Svea is, so I’ll elaborate. In Svea, you find the biggest coal-mining operation on Svalbard. It is run by the Store Norske Kullkompani and is located south of Longyearbyen in Van Mijenfjord. To get there, students can ask to go with Store Norske’s plane for bringing workers. The ride is free of charge and when you get there, the airstrip is roughly 5 kilometres from the UNIS cabin at Kapp Amsterdam.

Having never been to the students cabin in Svea and having no other plans that weekend, I accepted. Besides, the company was good. We were me, Graeme from Scotland who me and Christiane was also on a cabin-trip with the weekend before, Kim and Jocchem, the dutch duo and last, the german vegeterian, Mona. An interesting mix of people!

The trip to Svea was good. We thought it would be more exciting than it actually was. The plane ride was relatively bump-free and we got a really nice view of the mountains between Isfjorden and Van Mijenfjord. If only my camera wasn’t so shitty. Oh well. After we’d landed, it only took us half an hour or so to decide what direction we should walk and then we were on our way. While we were walking, we were keeping an eye at the sun because we knew there was supposed to be a near-full solar eclipse. It did get a bit gloomy and cold, although our eyes adapted so the difference wasn’t that obvious. Without special eclipse-glasses, you couldn’t really see much difference with the sun either. It was an OK experience, but it made me wonder slightly why people got so worked up about it back in the really old days. If you were a mayan indian working on your clay pot while there was a near-full solar eclipse, I figure you might not even notice what was going on.

Anyways, back to Svea. When we came there, we quickly checked the cabin book. Seems there had been polar bears in the area not long ago. Actually, the way I understand, that’s a relatively regular occurence in Svea compared to areas around Longyearbyen, like the Bjørndalen cabin. We made dinner and we got drunk. While all that was going on, we had an embarassing six hours of truth or dare. I don’t think I revealed any truly horrible secrets though, so it was a good night - although Kim kept taking embarassing photos and even recorded movies of us as we got drunker and drunker. I hope she’s not putting them up on youtube. She said she wouldn’t, but I know a few people here in the biology department who have seen a certain video of me leaning against the wall outside the cabin upside down (on a dare) while philosophizing about physics. I try not to mention it so that I don’t draw attention to it. It’s usually a good strategy.

The next day, we went on a walk along the beach - on a quest to find the whale bone(r). We quickly and naturally divided into two groups; me, Graeme and Jocchem (the guys) and Kim and Mona (the vegetarian girls). Kim and Mona were walking in front, Kim chainsmoking her way down the beach and Mona fuelled by plant power. We guys were taking it a bit more easy, seeing who could skip rocks as we went. We threw so many rocks, no wonder it’s shallow there. After a while, we found this small hill and while the girlteam thought that was good and started heading back, we guys found out that you could roll big rocks down the hillslope. We had a good half-an hour of fun doing that, although it may have been longer since time flies when you’re having fun. By the way, Kim found a whale-boner, she thought, but it was just a funny-looking stick. Still, despite this obvious flaw, she seemed quite proud and satisfied with her discovery. Eventually, we were back in the cabin for dinner and more alcohol. This time, we didn’t get as drunk because we were too tired and fell asleep on the couch.

The next day, we went on a trip to Gustavdalen, not far from the cabin. Well, it wasn’t very far on the map at least, only a few centimetres. After some hours when we finally got there, we found an excellent place to roll rocks. We caused many a rockslide before we headed back a bit early, seeing as we naively thought we were going back to Longyearbyen next morning. On the way back, we went over the moraines. The Svea moraines may look dull at first glance, but they’re actually quite amazing. While the efficient girlteam thought it was probably not worth checking out and headed off towards the cabin, us guys took the time to check out a mysterious white thingy on the moraine. We couldn’t figure out what it was with the binoculars, but when we got to it, it turned out to be a gigantic piece of bone from some whale. We had found the whale boner! Because of it’s size, we wondered if it could be a slice of warped tree-trunk, but seeing as it looked like bone and was missing the typical wood-tissues, we figured bone was the only good explanation. What it was doing there, we can only speculate.

On monday, we woke up early and after a while, we found out the plane wasn’t leaving because of fog. At least it wasn’t leaving with us, we did hear from others that the plane left several times that day but we weren’t told. Oh well, maybe they didn’t want us on board. The girlteam were inside (Kim got a bit sick and threw up a few times) while us guys spent most of the time outside. We perfected our rock-throwing skills on the beach and figured that maybe we were even able to hunt seagulls by rock throwing. It was a nice backup plan. After that, we spent some time drinking beers on the roof and shouting down the chimney. Not a bad day, but we were getting slightly worried about when we could get back to Longyearbyen. However, around 5 in the afternoon, we got a call that said we could leave the next morning at 8. Phew!

So on tuesday, we left the Sveacabin. We’d had a nice 4 full days there, but going back was nice seeing as we had work to do and we thought perhaps there was some tension building up between us and the Svea-miners since we were taking water from their cantina. Most of them didn’t seem too welcoming, but maybe that’s just their way .. and we did feel like intruders whenever we dropped by.

The plane back was good. I got some pictures that turned out horrible. Mona, I’m sorry for all the vegetarian jokes and thank you all again for a great weekend, guys!

Here are some pictures :

Den 17. juli forlot Christiane sommern i Oslo for å besøke meg i Longyearbyen. I 10 dager var hun min kjæreste samt felt og lab-assisten, en veldig grei ordning for oss begge - kanskje spesielt meg. :-)

Allerede første lørdagen etter hun kom dro vi atter på tur til studenthytta i Bjørndalen. Det var meg, Christiane, Graeme (uttales “Graham”) fra Skottland, Mona fra Tyskland, James fra England og hans kjæreste Cecilie fra Norge samt tyske Philipp og hans atter tyske kjæreste Mia. En god gjeng altså! Vi pakket selvsagt med øl, en flaske 12 år gammel bowmore og en flaske med Fernet Branca. Christiane improviserte en gryte-middag til alle, så varmet vi oss på kakao med mintu og deretter annen alkohol med påfølgende drikkelek til det ble sent nok til å legge seg. Som en slags bonus var det ingen som følte seg spesielt dårlige dagen etterpå heller.

I ukedagene etter helgen gjorde vi alt det vanlige feltarbeidet, dvs. besøke alle sites og samle vannet fra fellene mine og deretter prosessere alt i labben for å lage fine samples på alkohol. Med Christiane gikk alt labarbeidet kanskje 3 ganger fortere enn vanlig (kom tilbake, beibi). På fredagen møtte vi Siri og Idunn fra Blindern som også er kommet opp for å ta bachelorkursene som går på høsten ved UNIS. Vi forsøkte oss på en “pub crawl”, men kom ikke lenger enn Karlsberger før alle var for trøtte til å fortsette.

På lørdagen inviterte vi folk på slumpiekveld og på søndagen var det “electric apricot”-kveld. På mandagen skulle Christiane hjem igjen, men på grunn av tåke ble flyavgangen kansellert, noe vi begge var lettet over. Ny avgang fikk hun beskjed om at ikke ville være før klokken 00:40 onsdag morgen, dermed fikk vi en hel ekstra dag sammen. Dermed tok jeg med Christiane og Marie med som feltassistenter ned til Colesdalen for å hente samples. Logistikken kjørte oss ned i båt og slapp oss av. Vi fikk et par timer der til å utforske de forlatte russiske bygningene etter kulldriften, noe jeg ikke har hatt tid til før.

På kvelden da Christiane ringte flyplassen for å høre hvordan det gikk med flybussen fant hun ut at Norwegian-flyet hun hadde blitt fortalt skulle dra klokka 00:40 allerede hadde dratt tidligere på dagen! For å komme seg hjem ble hun nødt til å kjøpe seg en ny flybillett fra SAS (dyrt for en stakkars student) ned til Tromsø på natta for så å vente der til tidlig morgen så hun kunne komme seg til Oslo med Norwegian. Moralen er vel at man aldri må stole på at Svalbard lufthavn vil gi deg riktig tid eller at Norwegian vil prøve å få tak i deg for å fortelle deg når den nye flyavgangen er. Forhåpentligvis får hun refundert pengene hun brukte på SAS-billetten fra Norwegian.

Etter Christiane reiste har jeg hatt en slapp uke på UNIS. Bilene er blitt raukjørt og er inne til reperasjon, men ryktene sier at mekanikerne som skal jobbe på bilene for øyeblikket ikke engang er på Svalbard. Dermed kommer jeg meg ikke i felt så mye som jeg burde. Det tærer litt på humøret og som om det ikke var ille nok sender kompisene fra sørlandet meg bilder av dem som drikker øl og kjører båt og nyter varmegradene. Æsj - kom tilbake, Christiane!